Ayaneo 2S review: A surprisingly amazing handheld

Feb 27, 2024

I wasn't expecting it, but the Ayaneo 2S is probably my favorite gaming handheld yet.

With gaming handhelds taking off in the last year or so, we've seen devices like the Steam Deck challenged by the Asus ROG Ally. However, one other company that has entered the space and is starting to make waves is Ayaneo. The company has been churning out gaming handhelds for a while, and the Ayaneo 2S is the latest high-powered offering, packing an AMD Ryzen 7840U. It still runs Windows, sadly, but that's about it for the downsides.

If you're looking to pick up a new gaming handheld, the Ayaneo 2S is a strong contender for being worth your money. However, problems we ran into in the course of our review (which we will outline later on) may make some wary. There's no guarantee that you'll run into problems, but if you do, you'll be sending a device back to China for a replacement unit, and depending on where you live, that may prove difficult. Given it's a device that costs a lot more than the Asus ROG Ally and the Steam Deck especially too, it's going to be that may make it a hard sell.

If, however, you're happy to take that risk, then. There are very few complaints that I have, and it feels amazing in the hand with powerful hardware and surprisingly long battery life. We put ours through the wringer to assess how it fares in popular titles like Spider-Man, Call of Duty, and Ratchet & Clank, and it really, really impressed.

About this review: We received the Ayaneo 2S Retro Power for review from Ayaneo, after testing a previous unit that was faulty and had to be replaced. The company did not have any input into the contents of this review.

The Ayaneo 2S is a handheld gaming PC with a lot to love. It's got powerful performance, a nice UI, and an amazingly ergonomic feel in the hands that makes this an easy recommendation... so long as you can deal with potentially poor aftersales support, that is.

The Ayaneo 2S is available globally through the company's IndieGoGo campaign, with multiple storage options and variants available. It starts at $999 early-bird pricing with 32GB RAM and 512GB storage and goes all the way up to $1,599 early-bird pricing in a unit with 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.

The Ayaneo 2S is well-built, comfortable to hold in the hand, and feels more premium than both the Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally. It's covered in soft-touch plastic and incredibly ergonomic, with a well-balanced weight distribution throughout.

When it comes to ports, the Ayaneo 2S greatly impresses. It has not one, not two, but three USB-C ports. That's one on the bottom and two on the top. The bottom one can be used for charging and data transfer, the top middle one can be used for the same, and the one to the left is used for data only. This is useful as it allows you to be really versatile in how you charge and use the device, while also inserting multiple USB devices. What's more, in the box of the Retro Power device anyway, we got two USB-C to USB-A adapters.

There's also a fingerprint sensor inside the power button on the top, a microSD card slot on the bottom (with a magnetically held-in-place door), and a headphone jack right beside it too. The joysticks on either side are hall effect joysticks (meaning they make use of magnets and won't succumb to drift) that don't have any dead zone issues and the buttons all have a nice, plastic membrane underneath that isn't too mushy. Finally, there's a pair of bottom-firing speakers on the far left and the far right of the device.

As for how this entire bundle fares, it's pretty excellent. The speakers are probably the worst part of the entire device, as they sound kind of quiet and have poorer quality (especially compared to the excellent speakers of the Asus ROG Ally) in playing pretty much any game. However, they're certainly serviceable, and on their own, I haven't had anyone say they sound poor. The speakers are actually what failed in our original unit, and the headphone jack didn't work either. Another downside is the haptic motor which sounds loud, isn't strong, and I've actually disabled it in most games that I play.

The display, meanwhile, is a surprisingly brilliant one. I didn't expect much, given that it's only a 60Hz panel, but it looks good, gets pretty bright, and comes in at a whopping 1200p resolution, or 1920x1200. My biggest complaint about the display is that it actually doesn't get all that dim when the brightness is lowered. It stays pretty bright, which can be especially annoying when gaming at night. I've had to decrease the brightness of games separately when playing games in darker areas.

There are also gyro controls that you can apparently bind to just a regular input so that games will understand it, but I can't figure out how to turn it on. In the AYA Space settings (more on that later) I found a gyro option that every time I set it to enabled, it changes back to being disabled.

First and foremost, Windows 11 simply does not work on gaming handhelds like these to the same level as Steam OS does on the Steam Deck. It's clunky, it's frustrating, and on small screens like these, downright difficult at times to navigate. Once you have games up and running, it's all good, but everything outside of games is a mess. That's also not an Ayaneo problem, and I had the exact same complaint when I tested the Asus ROG Ally.

Having said that, AYA Space, equivalent to Asus' Armoury Crate SE, works quite well. It's basically an additional layer on top of Windows that aims to unify the experience in a way that makes more sense for the form factor, and it works well here. Its overlay is useful in games when you want to quickly adjust the TDP or the fan speed, and it's pretty responsive.

One of the best parts about it, though, is the ability to modify your settings while in a game. It will pause whatever is running and from here, you can change the TDP and some other settings like the fan profile.

It's not all good, though. AYA Space works, but there's a noticeable input lag when using the thumbsticks (the directional pad works fine, though) and the translations throughout are spotty at best. Still, you won't spend a lot of time digging through AYA Space settings, so it's not a big deal, especially when you have to import this device anyway. I've noticed that when I get an AYA Space update, it often resets the language back to Chinese, and I need to change it to English again.

The Ayaneo 2S prides itself on performance, and it absolutely delivers on all accounts. There are three presets for performance included: power-saving at 11W, balanced at 15W, and game at 22W. There's also a fourth pro mode, where you can set your TDP to a maximum of 33W. We tested games at different TDP levels to give you an idea of what to expect, and what games are playable.

The biggest concern here was thermals, where I measured a surface temperature of 55 degrees Celsius on the right-hand side of the display. While you don't usually touch this area during normal use, if you did, it could actually hurt you. I would also worry about what that kind of long-term heat could do to the display, as the operating temperature of LCDs can be as high as 70 degrees Celsius. Some are lower, though.

In 3DMark's Time Spy, we ran tests on each TDP mode.

From the results above, we can see that they are quite similar to the Asus ROG Ally. This is to be expected as the Asus ROG Ally's Z1 Extreme is very similar to the AMD 7840U. As you can see, there are diminishing returns, and you can see that applies to both the CPU and GPU performance.

First and foremost, we tested the storage speed of the Ayaneo 2S that we received, as slow storage will make even the most powerful hardware completely unusable. Some games are very storage speed-sensitive, too (such as Ratchet & Clank, which we test later), meaning that those games will suffer.

With a maximum read speed of 4835.59MB/s, you won't have any storage-related bottlenecking with games on this. This is some incredibly fast storage, and we're glad that Ayaneo didn't cheap out on it.

I played through Spider-Man: Remastered on the Ayaneo 2S, and have recently been playing through Miles Morales as well. It runs very well at 11W TDP, where it'll last a little over two hours on battery. You can increase the TDP for better performance at a cost of battery life, or reduce the graphic fidelity. Given that I've been playing the game on high at 1200p, it would probably make more sense to drop the graphics quality first.

The above graph shows the game running at around 30 FPS, but that's completely playable and with a lot of room to improve the performance. I was really impressed with the above, and it shows just how playable AAA titles like these are on a handheld.

I have also been playing a fair bit of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on the Ayaneo 2S and have found it to be an exceptional experience. Being a more competitive title, framerate is a priority, and so I run the game on the balanced power preset with low graphics at 1200p. As you can see above, it runs consistently at around 90 FPS without any issues.

On another note, being able to play a full-fledged Call of Duty game on a handheld is a crazy experience. It's not really something that you would associate with Call of Duty, especially when you consider that it's traditionally a console or PC title. It's not on the Nintendo Switch, and entries to the series on the DS, for example, were entirely different. Playing it on the go is a new experience that very few have been able to do in the past, and it's really, really good.

The newly released Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a game that has big question marks over its performance on many different systems. Your computer needs to be pretty fast for a smooth experience, as the game's dimension-hopping is a core element of its gameplay. That dimension hopping requires a powerful PC and quick storage, and the Ayaneo 2S absolutely delivers.

Looking at the chart above, there are a lot of single-frame drops, but these aren't noticeable when playing. 99% of frames are above 29 FPS when playing at 720p on medium settings and the 22W gaming mode, making this a more-than-playable affair for long periods of time. The battery life is what suffers most, but you'll still get nearly two hours of gaming time.

This game really showed me what the Ayaneo 2S is capable of, and I'm blown away by how well it performed.

You should buy the Ayaneo 2S if:

You shouldn't buy the Ayaneo 2S if:

The Ayaneo 2S is an exceptional gaming handheld, and we're only scratching the surface. One of the best parts of the device is actually the care given to providing usable peripherals in the box. Not only do you get two USB-C to USB-A adapters (for the other two USB-C ports) but you get a 100W GaN charger with two USB-C charging ports and two USB-A charging ports too. Even better, you get international adapters in the box that clip onto the charging brick, so you can use it anywhere. You even get replacement plastic shell pieces for the sides in case you damage the device if you opt to upgrade the SSD yourself.

However, there is one major caveat when it comes to the Ayaneo 2S. While I can still confidently say it's my favorite gaming handheld, I have questions about after-sales support and hardware issues. I ran into some on my first unit that I thankfully got replaced pretty quickly, but that's because I was actively in communication with the company.

In contrast, there are stories on Reddit of people saying that they had trouble swapping out units when they had problems, and they may not fill you with confidence. We've seen companies stir up social media to attack competitors on platforms like these all the time, so it's not a guarantee that you won't get the appropriate help that you need, but it's something to consider as even shipping it all the way back to China could prove difficult for some people if you run into problems.

Not only that, but Ayaneo has been pretty quickly pacing its releases. To their credit, owners of the regular Ayaneo 2 could get a free upgrade kit to improve the cooling and the audio of their units, but if you're the kind of person that always wants the latest and greatest, this probably isn't the product for you either.

Aside from that, the Ayaneo 2S is an excellent handheld. I play it a lot, games run flawlessly, and it's ergonomic in the hands. I like it more than the Asus ROG Ally for that reason, and it's the attention to detail that really does it for me. A good port selection, extra peripherals, decent software, and a fantastic in-hand feel make this a winner in my eyes.

The Ayaneo 2S is a handheld gaming PC with a lot to love. It's got powerful performance, a nice UI, and an amazingly ergonomic feel in the hands that makes this an easy recommendation... so long as you can deal with potentially poor aftersales support, that is.

I’m Adam Conway, an Irish technology fanatic with a BSc in Computer Science and I'm XDA’s Lead Technical Editor. My Bachelor’s thesis was conducted on the viability of benchmarking the non-functional elements of Android apps and smartphones such as performance, and I’ve been working in the tech industry in some way or another since 2017.In my spare time, you’ll probably find me playing Counter-Strike or VALORANT, and you can reach out to me at [email protected], on Twitter as @AdamConwayIE, on Instagram as adamc.99, or u/AdamConwayIE on Reddit.